"They had viewed, through widely different lenses, the amazing and disturbing and exhilarating American scene, Mencken aiming his binoculars and his bung starter at those well-known and badly battered objects of his eloquent scorn and ridicule, the booboisie, the Bible belt, the professor doctors, the lunatics of the political arena, and the imbeciles infesting literature; while Ross, fascinated by many things that would have bored Mencken, took in the panorama and personalities of New York City and finally the whole American spectacle, interested in everything from a swizzle stick he picked up one day ("There's a story in this damn thing") to the slight swaying of the Empire State Building in a stiff gale."